Marjorie Content

Her photographs have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. She was married several times, including for a short period to Harold Loeb, a writer and the editor of the avant-garde journal, Broom. Her marriage to writer Jean Toomer in 1934 lasted more than 30 years, to his death.

• Name — Marjorie Content • Born — 1895 • Birthplace — New York City, U.S. • Died — 1984 • Occupation — Photographer • Years Active — c. 1926–1935 • Known for — Modernist photography • Spouse — Harold Loeb (m. 1914; div. 1923) Michael Carr Leon Fleischman (div. 1934) Jean Toomer (m. 1934; his death 1967)

Marjorie Content was born into an ethnic German-Jewish family in New York in 1895, the daughter of wealthy Manhattan stock-broker Harry Content and his wife Ada. She was educated at the private Miss Finch's School, founded on the Upper East Side in 1900. During these years, she met Alfred Stieglitz, the uncle of a school friend, and they became lifelong friends. He was a prominent artist, photographer, and gallery owner. In 1914, Content left school at age 19 to marry writer Harold Loeb, also of New York. She moved with him to Alberta, Canada, where he had been working on a ranch. Their two children, Jim and Susan Loeb, were born there in quick succession in 1915 and 1916. After the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in the Great War, the couple could not stay in Canada as foreigners and returned to the United States. Loeb worked in San Francisco for a time with a business of his maternal Guggenheim relatives. He entered the Army when the United States entered the world war. Due to poor eyesight, Loeb was assigned to a desk job in New York City. In 1919, Content became a manager of The Sunwise Turn bookshop, a female-run bookstore devoted to new writing. Her husband was a part owner and also worked there. In 1921 Loeb founded Broom, a literary magazine, which deepened Content's connections to the literary and art world. One of his partners, Lola Ridge, the magazine's American editor, hosted artists in the office of Broom, which was located in the basement of Content's brownstone townhouse. Content and Loeb separated in 1921, and their divorce became final in 1923. Loeb moved to Rome and published Broom there, later moving the magazine to Berlin.

In September 1934, one day after her divorce from Leon Fleischman was completed, Content married widowed writer Jean Toomer in Taos, New Mexico. A resident of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, Toomer was of mixed-race ancestry and determined to be known as "an American." He was best known for his modernist novel, Cane (1923), an exploration of black culture in the Deep South and urban North. For the decade before his marriage to Content, he had been deeply involved in studying the ideas of Georges Gurdjieff. They brought Toomer's two-year-old daughter to live with them in their family. One scholar describes Content's marriage to Toomer as "a doomed alliance," blaming it for the end of her years of serious art-making. She did not continue with making many photographs. The couple continued to visit New Mexico together. In 1940 they settled on a farm in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania near Doylestown. They bought it with Content's money from her father. They maintained many connections with friends from New York, as this area was popular as a retreat for artists and writers from the city, and it had summer theater nearby in New Hope. The couple became active in reviving the local Quaker meeting. The two were married until Toomer's death in 1967.

Content rarely published her photographs and never exhibited. Since the late 20th century and the rise of appreciation of photography and women artists, her work has become of interest to collectors and art historians. Her photographs have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art. Solo exhibitions have been based on her and her works.

Marjorie Content is established in Bibliothèque nationale de France under 12504734h. Established in Library of Congress under n94047315. Established in RKDartists under 226871. Established in VIAF under 1699468. Established in FAST under 339594. Recognition and collections.